In Mexico, citizens create DIY bike lanes

On Vancouver's city council, support for building bike lanes has been pretty much unanimous. (It helps having a mayor who bikes to work and opposition members who spend their vacation cycling around Europe.)

Here, it's the politicians who have had to ease bike infrastructure into the public realm, with communication plans, consultations, and trial runs. For some, it's still too much. For others, not enough.

In Mexico, reports Treehugger.com, residents of Guadalajara -- a city that adds 350 cars to its street every day -- are taking a different approach, with DIY bike lanes.

The city at one point created a cycling plan with recommended bike routes. But nothing ever came of it. Fed up with their government's inaction, a group of citizens led by students and teachers at a local technical college, decided to take matters into their own hands. They erected signs and painted lines on the street to create dedicated bike lanes, and released a video and document explaining how and why they did it.

"In Mexico, the cost of building a bike lane reaches about a hundred thousand dollars per kilometer," the group explained. "This means that the section on which we worked, 2.5 kilometers on each side of a two way avenue, could have cost about five hundred thousand dollars. The investment, the citizen's investment, was of only a thousand dollars."